Time Loops

by Eric Wargo

  It is precisely that fact—that “prophecy” might give meaning and consolation in the face of trauma and a heartless universe—that fuels skeptics’ claims that people are simply biased; they want something like precognition to be real. That we are biased to find evidence for our preferred worldview is an argument that cuts both ways, though, as we will see. The fact that prophecies and premonitions are most often reported around traumas of one sort or another is no kind of argument against their existence. It only makes sense that some ability to pre-sense future events—if it exists—would orient us specifically toward meaningful upheavals, and experiences of death and loss are some of the most meaningful in our lives. 37

  Usually it takes some kind of public solicitation of premonitory dreams by researchers sympathetic to their mere possibility to elicit them in sufficient numbers that they can be examined as anything more than one-off occurrences. No modern discussion of the topic fails to consider the case of the tragedy that struck the small South Wales village of Aberfan on October 21, 1966. Just after the pupils at the village school had finished singing “All Things Bright and Beautiful” in the assembly hall and taken their seats in their respective classrooms, half a million tons of mine debris, piled on an adjacent mountainside and undermined by recent heavy rains, gave way and flowed into town, destroying the school. Rescuers were only able to pull out a handful of children alive. In all, 144 people were killed. 38

  Thinking that large numbers of people may have had premonitions of such a disaster, a paranormal investigator named John Barker solicited readers of the Evening Standard newspaper to report any dreams or visions they may have had before the event. The paper received 60 letters, most reporting premonitory dreams about trapped children, children being buried in coal, children dying in avalanches, and so on. One of the premonitions came (indirectly) from one of the victims of the disaster: The day before the event, a 10-year-old student at the school, Eryl Mai Jones, told her parents she dreamed that the school was gone because “something black had come down all over it.” In all, 24 of the letters included some kind of evidence of the premonition being recorded or told to someone before the disaster and thus could not be readily explained away as simple memory distortion.

  Skeptic Richard Wiseman, in his book Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There , devotes a chapter to debunking prophetic dreams, including the many dreams of the Aberfan disaster. For instance, he notes that for several years before the disaster, local authorities had been worried about the danger posed by the mine debris piled on the hillside. Three years before the event, a local engineer wrote that residents of the village shared this apprehension. So, Wiseman writes, “it is possible that the young girl’s dream may have been reflecting these anxieties.” 39 It is possible, certainly, but even if 10-year-old Eryl Jones was cognizant of the worries of grown-ups in her community, how would she have formed such a precise image of the mine debris destroying her school, specifically on the day before it did in fact happen? Unless the girl had similar dreams constantly—a possibility, certainly, but also a supposition—then Wiseman’s suggestion is rather desperate-sounding, and hardly convincing that this was “just chance.”

  As for how so many people reported such dreams, Wiseman resorts to the law of large numbers argument. He estimates that, given 365 nights of dreaming, each year for an adult lifetime (15-75) of about 60 years, a given adult will experience 21,900 nights of dreams, and that he may dream of an event like the Aberfan disaster once in that time. Statistically, the chances of having that dream on the night before an event roughly matching it would be one in 22,000, he says. But given that there were 45 million people in Britain, all subject to the same odds, about 2,000 people in every generation would have the amazing experience of dreaming about an event like Aberfan closely before a real event like it. “To say that this group’s dreams are accurate is like shooting an arrow into a field, drawing a target around it after it has landed and saying, ‘wow, what are the chances of that!’” 40

  But the question of the likelihood versus unlikelihood of a coincidence between a dream or an artwork and a supposedly predicted event, as Gardner put it in his book on the Titanic , is “not well formed” and can never be, for precisely the same reasons that the event was unpredictable in the first place: How do you isolate the relevant causal factors behind any event, or any two events that seem to coincide? Any calculation depends on how you define an event, how you draw lines around pieces of data, how much weight you attach to which causal arrows, decisions that in the end must be arbitrary or guided by your particular interests and biases. 41 Also, it is just as impossible to estimate the “rarity” of motifs in dreams as it is to estimate the rarity of events in real life. As a result, it is just as easy to use the law of large numbers to make the opposite argument from that of Wiseman. Writer Anthony Peake, countering Wiseman’s debunking of the Aberfan disaster dreams, offers the following calculation:

  [L]et us assume that there is a million-to-one chance that when a person has a dream about a plane crash a plane crash happens the next day. There are seven billion people on this planet. Now, according to a researcher called Hines, each human being has around 250 ‘themes’ in any one night. … So, by extrapolation, that is 1,750,000,000,000 dream themes every night. Assuming our one-in-a-million chance that somewhere in the world a plane will crash after a person dreams of a plane crash, then up to 1.75 million people may experience such a clairvoyant dream. This is 1.75 million for every disaster that takes place [and] a minimum of 547 million people every year will experience an absolutely stunning precognitive dream that will come true the very next day. Strange how quiet they all are! We can all play with this law of large numbers … 42

  In cases like 9/11 or the Titanic or the Aberfan disaster, we must also remember that massive loss of life is in a sense its own file drawer, taking away a vast and highly relevant sample we can never consult. We’ll never know how many victims of the Titanic or people who were working in the World Trade Center or children in that Welsh school had dreams or premonitions of the disaster that they failed to report to anybody (or heed as warnings). Consequently, the n we are left with may only be a fraction of the total. History does not have a control group.

  There is also a more basic problem, and that is that all these calculations rest on the prior presumption that dream contents are random. That has been the preferred position of many scientists over the past century, who have been as hostile to psychoanalytic and other interpretive approaches to dreaming as they are toward alleged psychic phenomena. But the idea that dreams are simply meaningless, random productions of the overactive brain is no longer borne out by the evidence of mainstream dream research, as we will see later. Even leaving aside the question of precognition in dreams, many researchers now would agree that dream content relates to an individual’s life experiences, possibly consisting of mnemonic associations to events in waking life. 43 Dreams are not random images, in this view, but are meaningfully linked to the dreamer’s biography and priorities.

  Consequently, any argued correspondence or non-correspondence of a dream motif to an actual rare event rests on establishing the rarity of that motif in the individual’s own dream life, not its rarity in the world of possible (random) dreams. Without knowing a great deal about the former, there is no way to calculate the “odds” of a particular idea or image showing up in an individual’s dreams, let alone in the dreams of any large sample of people. Wiseman estimates that people will dream of an event like Aberfan once in a lifetime; there is no basis to make such a claim. Some people dream of disasters nightly. But people being people, they are unlikely to keep extensive databases of their dreams. 44 Even when dreamers do keep computer-searchable records, since dream elements are drawn from an individual’s life history, subjective judgment plays a huge role in any interpretation of dream content or any assessment of dreams’ correspondence to events, whether in the past or future; thus such assessments stand little chance of swaying so
meone who will only listen to a claim that can be supported with statistics. It is this fact—that the dreamer is an n of 1 and that dream significance cannot readily be quantified and replicated—that has hindered the experimental study of dream content for decades and has biased many researchers against meaning-centered dream theories of whatever sort.

  Dreams lie on the unstable fault line between the objective and subjective. On one hand they are natural phenomena, probably reducible to physical processes in the brain; on the other hand, they have to do with meaning, which is ultimately the unique value of some image or symbol to an individual, based on his or her unique life experience. There may be no objective meaning in dreams, or objective way to assess their meaning. Thus, even if dreaming is every bit as natural and as biological as the process of digestion and its underlying processes can be studied scientifically, dream interpretation is largely beyond the pale of the methods used in science. It ought to be obvious that both approaches might be necessary and may even complement each other. Yet as we will see later, dream scientists have often been intolerant of hermeneutic approaches, to the detriment of making much progress toward understanding an extremely interesting, probably functionally crucial activity that humans spend about ten percent of their lives engaged in.

  * * *

  Time itself is another subject, not unrelated to dreams, whose notorious two-facedness has polarized thinkers for a century. On April 6, 1922, the physicist Albert Einstein, who insisted time was an objective, purely measurable, scientifically knowable framework, squared off at the Société française de philosophie in Paris with the philosopher Henri Bergson, who insisted that time was something rich in subjective meaning and could not be reduced to spatial terms (as Einstein’s relativity theory implied). 45 The event left intellectuals across Europe and America profoundly divided. It would be silly, in hindsight, to say that only one of these geniuses was right and the other wrong. They simply approached a profound problem from two very different avenues, both of which may be equally valuable and important. A decade and a half after this debate, F. Scott Fitzgerald observed in Esquire magazine that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” 46 Some never seem to get Fitzgerald’s memo, unfortunately.

  Academic disciplines that find themselves straddling the fault line between objective science and interpretation because they study the meaning-oriented behavior of human beings historically face unique difficulties, and often end up divisively fractured as a result. Psychology, which has long been polarized between an experimental/scientific mindset and the intuitive clinical approaches originally pioneered in Victorian Europe, is the clearest example, but there are others. My own graduate training was in anthropology, a field similarly riven between a more objective and materialist orientation and a more interpretive/hermeneutic pole. The most interesting thinkers in these fields—the “first-rate intelligences”—have been the ones best able to “flicker” between alternative perspectives on the same problem, paying attention to the objective and subjective while recognizing that neither can be collapsed into the other.

  Precognition, as a time- and dream-bound phenomenon, firmly straddles the fault line between the objective and subjective. I will be arguing on one hand that it is probably a neurobiological function related to memory, and thus we can expect a physical, material explanation in years or decades to come (in Part Two, I sketch what such an explanation might look like in its broad contours). But like a person’s memory, precognition is highly personal and centers on personally meaningful experiences. Thus, except for its defiance of the usual causal order, precognition is little different from anything else in a person’s biography—it needs to be understood within a life context and is subject to the same hermeneutic methods that are familiar to psychoanalysts and literary critics and philosophers. The tools of both the sciences and the humanities must be brought to bear, and neither should be favored over the other. The best we can do is flicker from one perspective to the other.

  Larger, Wilder, Stranger

  Wiseman, like most skeptics, repeats the argument that people believe in precognitive dreams and premonitions because they want something like prophecy to be real, that it confirms some preferred view of the world. Here he is certainly right. But he omits mentioning that the same thing is true for skeptics. The playwright J. B. Priestley, in a 1964 book on precognition and related questions called Man & Time , acknowledges that we cannot help but be biased in one direction or the other: “either we want life to be tidy, clear, fully understood, contained within definite limits, or we long for it to seem larger, wilder, stranger. Faced with some odd incident, either we wish to cut it down or to build it up.” 47 Many parapsychologists and other writers on the subject of precognition, who may likely fall in the “larger, wilder, stranger” camp, are susceptible to confirmation bias, but skeptics are just as commonly driven by conservatism bias, an unwillingness to consider new data. The bias-accusation game, like the “law of large numbers” game, is one that can be played by both sides.

  And while it is easy for skeptics like Wiseman to shoot down any one “impossible” anecdote with a volley of familiar biases and errors, divide and conquer must be seen for what it is: A wish to cut the affront down to size by isolating individual cases and making them seem like one-offs. 48 The file-drawer effect, too, cuts both ways. Compelling but “impossible” coincidences, dreams, premonitions, and so on are experienced by many, many people around many life events, and those who actually report them publicly or tell them to researchers represent only a tiny fraction of a larger unknown N . Most do not feel safe to divulge such experiences, given the stigma against the impossible that persists in our culture.

  The notion that people ought to be announcing their precognitive dreams from the rooftops whenever they have them, and that they must be the rare product of erroneous thinking since they are publicly disclosed so infrequently, runs exactly counter to the reality of human conformism. When most people in our culture do experience what they think could be a prophetic dream, they will tend to disbelieve it. Because social norms so powerfully inhibit sharing such dreams, there is no ready stock of public examples to validate one’s individual experience, thus the denial and skepticism are self-perpetuating. Cognitive dissonance is likely to boot the anomalous datum right out of awareness or memory. Martin Gardner claims that “there is a curious type of person, anxious to gain recognition in a community” 49 by falsely claiming to have predicted some event like the Titanic in a dream. But the opposite “type,” the conformist deeply fearful of being stigmatized as a kook and thus unlikely to notice let alone share anomalies, is surely far more prevalent. 50

  Priestley solicited viewers of a BBC television program called Monitor to send him their own accounts of precognition and premonition to be included in his book. He was overwhelmed at the response, writing that he stopped counting after 1,000; the total (according to a later researcher) was in the ballpark of 1,500 51 and included several hundred precognitive dream accounts. One thing that became clear from this enormous pile of correspondence was how taboo the whole subject was regarded, at least in mid-1960s Britain, and what barriers letter-writers had experienced against according their experience much, or any, validity. “Women especially, often mentioning scoffing ‘down-to-earth’ husbands, confessed their eagerness to write to somebody who might believe them.” 52 The gender breakdown of acceptance versus non-acceptance of anomalous experience may have shifted slightly in the past half century, but the basic division between “down to earth” skepticism and open-mindedness on such questions probably has not.

  Certain vocal skeptics notwithstanding, this invalidation is generally much subtler than even the kind of condescension Priestley’s female letter-writers reported getting from their husbands. What he found even more interesting and significant than overt resistance to the idea of precognitive dreaming was the more common ex
perience of what might be called “simple ignoral”:

  in most instances, when a dream had been told to husbands or (less often) wives or other members of the family or friends or workmates, and this dream had come true, these other people might marvel for a little while but always left it at that. The prevailing notion of Time was not then challenged. Our contemporary idea of ourselves was not questioned. Something odd had happened, that was all; it could not be fitted into the accepted pattern, so it was ignored. 53

  People who experience anomalies like a dream that “comes true” afterward will tend not to shout it from the rooftops; they will sweep the experience under the rug, just remain silent, or feel obliged to accept an alternative framing of their experience. Those alternative framings may come from skeptical authorities like no-nonsense spouses and doctors or from writers of books like Why People Believe Weird Things 54 (by skeptic Michael Shermer, who clearly never heard of the benefits of believing six impossible things before breakfast) or books with subtitles like Why People See Things that Aren’t There (i.e., Paranormality , by Wiseman). 55 Science is not finished—it is never finished—so can we really consider what is and isn’t there a settled matter?